Skype for Business is an interesting beast. It is a nice little program for internal collaboration, but some of its behaviors are just super-annoying. One my pet peeves is the fact that when you get into a meeting with screen sharing you have a bunch of big heads covering up a sometimes significant chunk of the materials being presented. I finally figured out how to get rid of them. It comes down to the view mode. This little icon in the toolbar:

Now that Windows 10 has been officially out for a while, I decided to give it a try on one of my home machines. I expect that all my Windows 8.1 machines will be updated eventually – it is a free update, after all, and supposedly things should work just as well as in Windows 8.1. Just with a different user interface. Windows 10 is indeed different from Windows 8.1 in fairly significant ways, and it really feels like what would have come after Windows 7 if Windows 8 hadn’t come between. I can see why many or even most people see this as the better upgrade path, even if I lament some of the changes made.

Apple just released their new iPhone 5s, where the biggest news is really the 64-bit processor core inside the new A7 SoC. Sixty four bits in a phone is a first, and it immediately raises the old question of just what 64 bits gives you. We saw this when AMD launched the Opteron and 64-bit x86 PC computing back in the early 2000’s, and in a less public market the same question was asked as 64-bit MIPS took huge chunks out of the networking processor market in the mid-2000s. It was never questioned in servers, however.

It used to be that Microsoft was the big, boring, evil company that nobody felt was very inspiring. Today, with competition from Google and Apple as well as a strong internal research department, Microsoft feels very different. There are really interesting and innovative ideas and paper coming out of Microsoft today. It seems that their investments in research and software engineering are generating very sophisticated software tools (and good software products).

I have recently seen a number of examples of what Microsoft does with the user feedback data they collect from their massive installed base. I am not talking about Google-style personal information collection, but rather anonymous collection of user interface and error data in a way that is more designed to built better products than targeting ads.

There seems to be no shortage of bugs that “should have been obvious” and subject to the “how can you not check that your own products work together” phenomenon. Just the other day, I stumbled on another one. This time, it was the Microsoft set of applications and operating systems that do not quite work together the way you would expect them to.

The recent news that Microsoft has taken out an ARM architectural license has caused a lot of speculation about just what this might mean. There are several quite well reasoned ideas around the web, and I have one idea of my own: sixty-four bits.

Since I am slow to follow Internet fads, I am probably the last blogger on the planet to write about this… but it is too good not to mention. Microsoft research has created a brilliant or nutty piece of work called Microsoft (Research) Songsmith. The idea is pretty cool in theory, just sing into a microphone and the program creates background music matching… except that it does some pretty hilarious things when put to the test.

The register report “IBM embraces – wtf – Sun’s Solaris across x86 server line” is a very appropriate headline for something quite surprising. The day before this happened, we discussed the announced announcement and said “nah, it can’t be about operating systems”. The idea of IBM in-sourcing Solaris for x86 just felt like the kind of thing that was in the same realm as flying pigs, freezing hells, and similar unlikely events.